Not long ago the idea of someone sabotaging Gary Powers' U2 was taken as impossible, it simply could not be.

Over the years all kinds of excuses were thrown over the realities of what can be known now. The pilot was slandered as incompetent.

Writers implicated with "the national security apparatus" wrote all kinds of truths and half truths about the aircraft, the pilot and such.

The majority of those authors slandered all other versions of the crisis and the "shotdown" fable was born, nurtured and promoted.

In the face of the fables I did what I had to do, I started researching the issues around the May Day events.

Fables don't die that hard, truth does.

I found the SOP santizing procedures for pilot and aircraft would render the Fable as impossible, three aircraft are staged, three pilots are prepared.

The Fable would insist that no one knew before hand which aircraft and pilot were to be utilized.

The U-2 was an excellent advance in aerospace technology and came out of Kelly Johnson's Skunkworks of Lockheed. The required parameters of its' flight at altitude were as tight as any F-4 or F-100 and even the F-104 of the 1960 time frame. A book written in conjunction with surviving U-2 pilots reports that the tolerance of speed range between stall (loss of control and falling) and blowing the wings off the airframe was 5 flipping knots. This is an extremely tight pilotage requirement for any human being. This parameter of rate of travel is by no means the only limitation of the flight envelope.

It doesn't take much research to learn that the selected (by Bissell??) pilots wore 'spacesuits" very similar to the 1960-62 Mercury Seven equipment, or that the pilots were as skilled as any military test pilots from which the Astronauts were selected to be coronated to Life Magazine's mantle of greatness.

Instead of accurate reportage the pilot was slandered as screwing the pooch. No falsehood was too much crap for the Fable Makers.

Someone in the command authority knew the aircraft was not coming back from this May Day mission, further knew which of the three aircraft was fated to fly and which pilot was fated to death by sabotage.

This is an easy conclusion to reach and support. All the ID present in the parachute pack proves all was not SOP that time. The evidence supports but does not prove that the "WW2 bomber camera" on Mr. Powers' U2 instead of the bleeding edge technology normally used for U-2 overflights. Strongly supported but not proven beyond doubt by photos of wreckage from the Soviets.

But oops the pilot survived.

Even then after the exposure of overflights and the Eisenhower lies about the flight, Khrushchev tried to leave a wiggle out for Eisenhower,

if he would admit the flight was committed without the President's knowledge.

Eisenhower could not do this or chose not to do so in an election year.

This wise statecraft, the same method JFK kept in mind two years later in finding a better way than war in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Consider the position of an opponent and try to avoid backing them into a corner forced to make war for lack of any alternative.

Secret communications back channels are nothing new in international relations,

but in that case it was another last straw of contention between the DOD and the President.

Why would the secret team go to all the trouble of creating an international incident?

A benefit to the Enemy was to kill Eisenhower's attempt to cool off the Cold War - his Crusade for Peace.

To make the 1960 Paris Summit a stage presentation for the Soviets to humiliate any peace seeking statesmen.

Another was the defeat of Eisenhower personally to destroy his hopes for a better legacy left to the world.

After the April 9 [1960] U-2 flight, Eisenhower was impressed by the fact that Khrushchev, “for his own

reasons,” did not protest. As Kistiakowsky later said, “This was virtually inviting us to repeat the sortie.”

Dulles and Bissell appealed for another mission. Importance: “well above average.” They wished to get a fresh look at Tyuratam and other Soviet military-industrial landmarks such as Sverdlovsk. But according to Bissell, the most vital target was six hundred miles north of Moscow at Plesetsk. As Arthur Lundahl recalled, the April 9 flight and other sorties had found evidence that the first operational ICBMs were being deployed there, but they had not obtained the kind of photography they would have wished. Another run would reveal Soviet progress.

Bissell argued that if they waited, they might miss the chance to see the missiles under construction. And by then, the missiles might be camouflaged. In the northern latitudes, the sun’s angle was judged critical for U-2 photography. It was argued that a mission over Plesetsk could only be flown from April through July.

Christian Herter later said, “The summit meeting was very much on my mind, as it was on everybody’s mind at the time. The real issue was: How urgent was the information, and is there any one time that is more favorable than another? From a technical point of view, the time was more favorable at that time than another. From a diplomatic point of view, it seemed to me that with the President scheduled to go to Russia later, there would have been the same difficulty.”

If they waited until July and weather was poor, the U-2 might be barred from taking clear pictures of Plesetsk until April 1961. In the meantime they might obtain other forms of intelligence, but these would probably be inconclusive. They might photograph the target from a satellite, but so far the United States had been unable to launch one.

Allen Dulles later noted that in times of tension, people said that “flights should be stopped because they increase tension. In times of sweetness and light, they should not be run because it would disturb and ‘honeymoon’ in our relations with the Soviet Union.” By that logic, he said, one would never fly at all.

“There is always some international conference or something,” said Thomas Gates.

More than Herter, Dulles or Gates, the President was eager to build a lasting détente and knew how each incursion provoked the Russians. Still Khrushchev had not complained of the April flight and had not been able to knock it down. Perhaps it was caution enough to close down the program for weeks immediately before the Paris conference. Thus Eisenhower sent the U-2 onto the Soviet Union one more time.

“AS THE GLOW OF SUNRISE ILLUMINED the snowcapped peaks of the Western Himalayas, the pilot moved the throttle lever to full power and the heavily laden plane began a lazy roll down the long runway at Peshawar. The engine whined, the rate of acceleration was slow, and with each unevenness of the runway the long downward sloping wings dropped up and down, unable to come to life at that slow speed. And then, with more speed, the wings began to fly. They rose and steadied, the flopping and oscillation dampened out, and they strained to lift the heavy plane into the air. Just before the runway ran out, one last light bump, gentle as the tiptoe leap of a ballet dancer, lifted the plane into the air, and it was instantly transformed into a thing of beauty - a graceful long winged jet.

As speed built up and wheels were retracted the plane sped through the pre dawn haze. The pilot eased the flaps up into the wings and began to climb toward the mountains. High above and to the left was the historic Khyber Pass. On course, there was a pink tinged twenty-five thousand foot peak, and further to the right was Godwen Austen, over twenty-eight thousand feet, wearing its perennial white plume. The jet was so heavy that the pilot swung it into a lazy turn inside the valley to spiral up and out, gaining altitude as he went, until he was above that famous path of the conquerors through the Khyber and nearly level with the twenty-five thousand foot mountain top. Kabul the capitol of Afghanistan, lay below; to the right, Tadzhik, the first major city inside the Soviet Union, lay ahead with Tashkent beyond. Border crossing was made at Kirovabad in a climb to sixty thousand feet. The sky was clear and dark blue - the sky that only the small band of jet pilots know the world around. At this altitude the weather, whatever weather there was, was a remote thing, noticed only as patches of white cloud below, obscuring the ground. At cruising altitude the cockpit air system had cleared out all moisture, and the canopy was clear and brittle. Visibility was almost limitless. The pilot was a lone soul above the world, above all normal environment, under a simple, burning sun, and tuned to the even silence of the engine and the slow, mushy responsiveness of the controls in the near vacuum of the atmosphere at that height.

In the still early morning at Peshawar, the operational team had just finished flashing their message to Washington: "Puppy 68" was off and on his way to Norway via Sverdlovsk. The watch officer in the special U-2 control office in downtown Washington got that word shortly after 8:30pm on the evening of April 30. Dick Bissell, the Agency man in charge of the U-2 project, was notified immediately. Then, in short succession four other men were called. One by one they heard the same information, "Puppy 68 is away." President Eisenhower was at his favorite retreat, Camp David, with Prime Minister Macmillan of Great Britain, putting the finishing touches on plans for the summit conference. De Gaulle had just left Washington, and Macmillan and De Gaulle were scheduled to meet again in Paris on May 5. All was well with the world. The aging men who had led the world through World War II and then through the bitterness of the Cold War were preparing to culminate their long efforts in a great summit conference and then, one by one, lay down Krushchev's Challenge: the mantle of government to a new generation who would reap the benefits of peace - hopefully true and lasting peace.

The fate of the world hung in the balance somewhere between these earnest plans for peace and the miles remaining ahead of that U-2 as it neared Sverdlovsk. This was not the normal U-2 flight. Much was made of the fact that the pilot had with him a vial (needle) of poison; so that rather than expose his native land to charges of willful violation of the air space and sovereignty of the Soviet Union, he could silence himself in death. The code of the spy. Yet little was made of the antithetical fact that the pilot also had a parachute which would save his life. Much was made of the fact, afterwards, that this was a "civilian" aircraft and that it was flown by a "civilian" pilot. Yet this pilot had been permitted to carry with him on this flight his military identification card, complete with name and picture, along with a pocketful of other identifying cards, all of which easily placed him at military installations, in military instrument flight schools, and on military facilities just days before the flight. He was hardly a deniable spy.

Much was made later of the fact that Air Force Captain Powers had resigned from the Air Force and that he was a civilian employee of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was technically a civilian: But his records were still held by the Air Force, and had he chosen, he could have returned to the Air Force without loss of pay, seniority, and promotion status.

Furthermore, the number of identification items that he had with him made it clear that he was less a true civilian and more a civilian cover spy pilot. He was in the same mold as Allen Pope in 1958, who was captured by the Indonesians, and of the Air Force crew that was shot down in Armenia also in 1958. By that time the Russians had plenty of evidence to know that "civilian" pilots belonged to the CIA by way of the U.S. Air Force.

This course of events had more impact upon the United States than upon the Soviet Union. The U.S. Government made much of the fact that the U-2 was an "unarmed civilian aircraft'' and that it was flown by a civilian. However, in his book, The Craft of Intelligence, Allen Dulles makes much of the fact that operation of such sophisticated aircraft could scarcely have been kept a secret. It wasn't! As he wrote, "Sooner or later, certainly this would have leaked out." Since this was so certain, then why did the U.S. Government have to give out untrue cover stories? And why did they have to permit Powers to carry so much identification when it would have been better to limit the leak as much as possible? Even if he had died, they would have had all the information they needed. How did it happen that they broke with policy procedures for that special flight by letting him take off loaded with incriminating evidence that proved he was a U.S. spy pilot? Who was it who wanted this special U-2 flight on May 1, 1960, two weeks before the summit conference, to fail and then to become so glaring an admission of guilt when it did fail that it would inevitably doom the summit conference along with it? The incidence of these things, too many things, give weight to the thought that this flight was intended to be something rather special.

Nothing was said that all clandestine operations personnel, and especially the select coterie of U-2 pilots, were required to submit to a complete inspection before takeoff, which included the removal of all clothes and other personal effects and the issue of sanitized, non-identifiable clothing and equipment sufficient only for the flight. Neither pilot nor plane were sanitized on this flight as was required on other flights.

But these are only details that came up after the flight. The special question about this flight and this plane and this pilot was, "Who sent him out in the first place? What was this flight supposed to gain that could have been worth one particle of what it lost?'' The Secretary of State, in attempting to justify the flight and as the official spokesman for his Government, said, "Conditions at a latter season would have prevented obtaining very important information. There is never a good time for a failure of an intelligence mission. We believe it unwise to lower our vigilance because of these political negotiations."

=====================================

I am enjoying the heck out of researching this event even though it fell in Eisenhower's administration. After all how often does the love of aerospace intersect with political research? Too often....

I underlined passages that are significant to me the reasons I hope to make clear in other posts.

Jim

PS. The brittle canopy at altitude is significant because photos of the intact canopy refute the fable of a SAM shooting down this aircraft.

The tail being blown off by the detontation cannot be reality. The airframe would have disintegrated along with the brittle canopy at altitude and Mr. Powers would have died quickly.

Kelly Johnson had to be proud of his work. Again, he and his “Skunk Works” team had produced an aircraft beyond the world’s capabilities. Reportedly the newest black bird had come in ahead of schedule and under budget. The U-2’s heritage to the first operational jet fighter could be seen it it’s fuselage.

It was defenseless depending on not stealth but altitude to avoid interception in unfriendly skies. So little was known about the Soviet Union that targeting data was needed for the Strategic Air Command. This aircraft was a new way to do the required job. It could fly high enough to make interception a practical impossibility. It carried no weapons defensive or offensive. It was also at the direction of the President to be operated by the C.I.A. to remove the U.S.A.F. from the equation in the event of a loss of the aircraft in less than friendly territory. While the prototype was a miraculous aircraft, a sister ship was to provide the turning point for a crucial event shaping the future directly and indirectly for years. This decision though he did not know it at that time would bear bitter fruit for Eisenhower in the Crusade for Peace closing days of his administration.

Camera and surveillance technology had a part to play also. A Mr. Lundahl had perfected an airborne camera that had enough resolution to show details adequate for interpretation at the National Photographic Interpretation Center. Of the two secrets involved, the camera was more secure as the Soviet Air Force was more capable of finding a means to stop spy overflights than to copy the Lundahl camera successfully.

The U-2 was protected by altitude primarily and not by speed or maneuverability. Secrecy and altitude were its' best allies in the unfriendly skies it was designed to penetrate. There could be no other reason for its existence but to penetrate and bring back intelligence from hidden places. Nothing current in that day could prevent the spy ship from being detected by radar. Detection and interception are two different things.

So by Presidential decree the C.I.A. was in the business of the collection of intelligence in some of the blackest and most secure operations of that day. So much for “the coordination of intelligence” as the original enacted law defined. By 1958, the restrictions of the National Security Act of 1947 were gone.

General Curt LeMay had been exercising Operation Control in spite of the fact that the operation had been rejected by John Foster Dulles’ Department of State. Operation Control was a series of penetration flights by S.A.C. bombers into the Soviet Union to gather badly needed intelligence and to possibly provoke global thermonuclear war. I don’t know which particular Dr. Strangelove originated this idea but it is known that Generals Curt LeMay and Thomas Power of S.A.C. supported it. They were then the two upper most commanders of the U.S.A.F.’s Strategic Air Command. S.A.C at that time had more explosive weapons at their command and control than had been imaginable twenty years before. The position of the S.A.C. leadership was that even more unbridled power was needed.

LeMay and General Thomas Power, LeMay's deputy S.A.C. commander thought that they ought to be given power to deploy and use nuclear weapons without presidential approval if the President were out of contact. In reaction to the somewhat typical attitude of some military men, J. Kenneth Gilbraith reported that John Kennedy asked in private if “these men belong to the human race?” This though, is getting slightly ahead of the story as this incident occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It begs the question of whether or not war is too important to be left to the generals or to the politicians.

It has been said that the career military mindset of that time did not know how to do “cold war.” People having dedicated their lives to the pursuit of war and still having war defined rightly as total war or not war, could not easily adjust to this cold war attitude of on the edge of war but not at war. They had won a total victory and secured a peace that turned into almost a war and almost a peace. A state of affairs that could not have been comfortable, not for the career soldiers, not for the political statesmen and not for the populations.

In what becomes a familiar theme of the ‘secret history of the United States' a needed program of collecting intelligence would be used to forever alter the power of the people. In this specific case the power of the Eisenhower administration as well as those that followed.

The overflights had been going well and enough data had been gathered to expose the fallacy of the bomber gap to the upper levels of the chain of command. This fact was not common knowledge to the people in the streets, again the use of fear of another current enemy and the red scare was even in 1959 a real aspect of manipulation of the electorate. No one would question the money given to Boeing or Lockheed in the face of a real bomber gap or the newest rendition that of the missile gap.

Even today ten years after the fall of the “Soviet Communist global conspiracy," it is not uncommon to hear in 2002 a political opponent painted pink, liberal, or socialist leaning. The paranoia of the Capitalist continues.

In the late 1950s the former Nazis were working feverishly in the hidden enclaves of Wright Patterson or Edwards A.F.B. and the Redstone Arsenal as well as White Sands etc. But the good old C.I.A still needed airborne reconnaissance of the Soviet Union in spite of the presence of Reinhardt Gehlen’s operatives.

Maybe as the N.A.S.A. bureaucrat remarked “Our German’s are better than their Germans.” I think this ignores the history of Soviet science, this discounts the genius of Andrei Sokarov as well as the work done in Soviet aerospace. Sokarov’s “layer cake” design of the thermonuclear device was a new design not stolen from the U.S.

Another jolt of reality was about to bring the point home in the form of Sputnik. Reaction to the opening salvo of the Space Race was shock and fear. A soviet “moon” was beedle beeping its way around the planet and it seems that each orbit brought more passionate cries of the “west’s” loss of direction and leadership in the world of technology. The American education system was called into question. Even the younger generation of American youth was berated as lazy and not interested in science and technology. The need for larger and larger defense budgets was cried out to the populace. Again they agreed from fear as another “proof” of Soviet intentions was espoused.

Soviet intentions were indeed expansionist but the technological “lead” and its use in fear tactics were only manipulations of the peoples. The agenda of the shackling and subjugation of the U.S. government was coming along nicely, but the danger was NOT from outside our borders but from within.

For years the American people had felt safe in “that couldn’t happen here, the checks and balances inherent in our system would keep ‘them’ from taking over here.” The danger was neither fascist nor communist but from inside the American system. Indeed this is the only way to conquer America- from the inside!

Fletcher Prouty was in the exact place to know the inner workings of the U-2 Affair. From his article “The Sabotaging of the American Presidency” the following establishes his position to know the inner workings of the Elite to disrupt the last peace effort of President Eisenhower.

“I was the properly designated military officer in the Pentagon for a period of nine years -including 1960-responsible for exactly this function of supporting the clandestine activities for the CIA. Under my direction many aircraft, many items of equipment, and many personnel were properly sterilized and "sheep-dipped" prior to use in secret missions. The U-2's were no exception.

As a matter of fact, the entire U-2 program was supposed to have been made sterile from production on up. I must say I knew the CIA to be meticulous about deniability. On regular clandestine overflights to China, Tibet, Indonesia, Burma, and other places, they did their best to conform with and obey the NSC directive.” [1]

The NSC directive involved he explained:

“In 1960 the directive NSC 10/2, published by the National Security Council (NSC) required that any clandestine operation must be operated so that if it failed or was compromised in any way, this country would be able to plausibly deny the existence of the operation. In CIA jargon, the plane and the pilot had to be "sterilized". The CIA and the Department of Defense (DOD) had spent millions of dollars sterilizing aircraft and equipment used in clandestine operations, so that anyone who might uncover an operation would be unable, under reasonable circumstances, to trace it positively to its true origin. Why then did Powers carry ID, and why did this U-2 carry so many identifying marks and decals?” [1]

The preflight procedures were designed to prevent the loss of “plausible deniability” for the C.I.A.

“The Powers identifying evidence violated the NSC mandate. If this was a spy mission, the violation was clearly planned to wreck the upcoming summit conference. It was normal DOD-CIA practice that pilots engaged in clandestine operations don pressure suits which contained no identification of any kind prior to takeoff. In the process, the pilot was required to strip, and all identity and personal items were removed by the officials in charge of that flight. Not only was this standard procedure a matter of great care, but in important cases, two or three aircraft and two or three pilots would be readied for each flight. The pilots would not know which plane they might fly, and no pilot would know his mission until the final briefing.” [1]

It gets better or worse depending on your perspective. When Gary Powers was captured alive he had packed in his parachute pack all manner of identification including a PX card for a U.S.A.F. base. Mr. Powers did not pack this parachute, someone had gone through the trouble to be certain that the pilot would be identified as American. It gets even more revealing to note that the Lundahl camera was NOT aboard the lost spy plane. Col. Prouty again was in the perfect position to be able to find truth about this matter.

“On September 24, 1959, [a] secret aircraft came to a belly landing on a tiny Japanese glider field near Atsugi. That airplane was a CIA, civilian-piloted U-2 spy plane. On May 1, 1960 that same U-2, serial number 360, having been rebuilt at the famous "skunk works" at Lockheed, flew over the USSR and landed at Sverdlovsk, changing the course of history.” [1]

A craft rebuilt at Lockheed, as we will see the camera was switched from the Lundahl to a common bomber camera months before the May 1st loss of that aircraft. It begs the question, Why? If someone knew ahead of time of the loss of Mr. Powers’ plane it all falls into place. Someone did as will become clear.

“The camera the Russians recovered from Powers' U-2 was a military-type, 73B, serial number 732400. With wide-angle capability, it took pictures of a 125-mile-wide strip. The film was twenty-four centimeters wide and two thousand meters long, capable of shooting four thousand paired aerial pictures. That camera was not the one routinely used by the CIA spy U-2's. This U-2 had been doctored in Japan by someone who was willing to give away the plane but unwilling to reveal the technology of the newer U-2 camera. This was skillful deception from the inside. Dr. Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, wrote in his book, Secrets, Spies and Scholars, "The invention of the U-2 high-flying aircraft and the camera capable of taking pictures from 80,000 feet, pictures that would permit analysts to recognize objects on the ground with dimensions as small as 12 inches...this technical miracle revolutionized intelligence collection."

The pictures Khrushchev showed to the public and to newsmen gave away the ruse.

The industrial installations and the rows of aircraft exhibited were tiny dots on regular film, and even with the best enlargement, they would never have met Dr. Cline's criterion of twelve inches from 80,000 feet. This is a crucial point. The U-2 incident was a clever and sinister deception. Its perpetrators intended for the Russians to find the U-2 and to think Powers was doing a spy's work. Yet, these perpetrators were far enough up in Government circles to know that it was the technology of the camera which must not be given away.” [1]

So much for the Lundahl camera being lost on this flight. I have studiously avoided referring to the U-2 as shot down BECAUSE it was not and never had been.

It was forced down by flame out at altitude. Evidence being the “alive and kicking” condition of the pilot. Any object impacting an aircraft in flight at 80,000 feet would destroy the aircraft reducing the plane to small debris and more than likely killing the pilot. The pilot was alive, the film was intact and developed by Khrushchev. What other conclusion can be drawn but the U-2 was disabled and forced to a lower altitude where it was vulnerable to Soviet interceptors and forced to land “dead stick” in farm fields as photos of that time show. Even the canopy of the U-2 appears intact and the aircraft appears pretty much intact as the pilot does.

How does one go about forcing down an aircraft that had flown with impunity for some time over Soviet airspace? Or better yet, how does one ignore the expressed presidential order to suspend all over flights for the up coming Paris Summit of 1960? From a very high and protected position to know and control all these various factors. Protected and sponsored it is seemingly easy as Col. Prouty details.

“When work with the special modification of the J-75 engine for the U-2 began, it was realized that the U-2 would be operating in a hostile environment. At very high altitude the engine can't breathe, and it needs help. It must have some air-mass intake to support combustion. During experiments, it was discovered that a trace of hydrogen introduced into the fuel-air mixture would support combustion and would virtually assure reliable operation of the burner at very high altitudes. Only those very close to the operation knew that the U-2 engine needed and had this hydrogen capability. Thus, the U.S. Air Force had an elaborate, ultra-secret program, directed from the aeronautical center at Dayton, Ohio, which provided cryogenic (super-cold) liquefied hydrogen to the U-2 program all around the world, just before each planned mission.

Now we begin to find the Achilles heel of the entire U-2 program, and perhaps the single link to someone in power to the success or failure of any go-for-broke U-2 mission. Here was a way to demolish the Eisenhower-Khrushchev peace talks.

Consider the scenario. A tiny group of top-level technicians with access to this hydrogen lifeline is charged with the responsibility of getting it to the Powers U-2. However, someone has arranged for less than a full canister to be installed in the U-2 just before takeoff. The preflight check shows "Hydrogen-OK" because the preflight inspection only shows that the canister is there, not how much hydrogen is in it.

The pilot has no way of knowing that there is not sufficient hydrogen in the canister for 3,900 miles because there is no gauge on his instrument panel. So, the 24,000-pound aircraft takes off, accelerates to 114 knots, and begins the long climb to altitude. Everything appears to be perfectly normal. The engine runs fine. All equipment functions. Then, at precisely the predetermined time, the hydrogen runs out. The plane is as high as it can fly because it must make the longest flight it has ever made. At that great height, the pilot hears a slight rumble, typical of a flame-out, and his engine goes dead. One way or another, he lands.

Persuaded none too gently by the Soviets that the rumble was in reality a near-miss rocket strike, he goes along with the story. Why shouldn't he? It's plausible. He says he was shot down. Allen Dulles, who knows better, says he was not hit. And there is the case. Someone preplanned for that U-2 to come down by arranging to starve it of hydrogen. That is when Powers radioed, or the telemeter radioed, a flame-out.

There were certain upper-echelon officials in research and development who knew about the U-2's special characteristics and could easily have arranged for the flame-out to occur.” [1]

Interesting is it not? Embarrassment for the U.S.A.F., the U.S. government and the U.S. President brought about by someone in the part of the government’s most secure operations. Hmm…

I would also point out that because of the presence of a Col. L. Fletcher Prouty and his own integrity and belief in the American system that we all are given a penetrating and truthful window into the arena of elite power politics.

At extreme cost, preparation and with little known concern for the imprisonment of one of their own pilots a plane was sabotaged in a very difficult to detect manner.

More crucial were the destruction of the Paris Summit and the elimination of Eisenhower’s Waging Peace endeavor. Imagine détente beginning in 1960, would that have been a peace dividend?

If one thinks that it was all a sad accidental event and the “official story” got it right consider the lies told by the U.S. government about the plane being a N.A.S.A. weather plane experiencing an oxygen system malfunction before the Soviet Premiere revealed his hand to show “oh by the way we have the pilot alive and kicking and talking.” Imagine Mr. Powers’ dismay when he figured all this out waiting in Lubyanka prison. Someone inside the U-2 program knew when the N.A.S.A. lie went out that it was only a cover story. Was this overseer Allen Welsh Dulles director C.I.A.? No as we will discover.

“When it was discovered that the U-2 had not completed the trip but had gone down, a group at NASA began the unpleasant task of getting out the canned cover story to account for that flight. On May 5, 1960, high-level experts working within the framework of an approved scenario issued a story which had the U-2 taking off from Turkey and crossing the Soviet border inadvertently. But then they said other things that were very strange. They stated that the U-2 was a "plane chartered from Lockheed by NASA" and that it was being flown at the time by "a Lockheed employee". Furthermore, they said the plane was "marked with 'NASA' and in the black and gold NASA seal," and that the pilot "had reported having oxygen difficulties." These were all official U.S. Government statements. They were flashed all over the world, even though other men in the Government knew they were lies.

To those familiar with the intricacies of preparing cover stories or canned lies, the above may not seem crucial. But here were top-echelon officials putting out an important public release affecting national policy matters, and they caught themselves in a trap. Telling Krushchev that the plane left from Turkey when Krushchev had the plane, the pilot, the navigation maps, and the camera with all its film was just plain stupid. But the trouble was not stupidity. That NASA cover-story team did not know what some others hidden away in the Government did know -that the plane had left from Pakistan, that it did not have "NASA" and the gold seal painted on it,and that the Lockheed employee had Air Force identity and orders from Dulles (according to Dulles) to declare that he worked for the CIA. It became obvious that President Eisenhower did not know those things either. It was not in his interest to have approved the release of such lies.

Then came the challenge to Eisenhower. Did the President, who had worked so hard and so long to prepare for the ultimate summit conference and for his Crusade for Peace, direct that U-2 to overfly the USSR on May Day-the day of its most important celebration! The idea was absurd, and Krushchev knew it. Later Krushchev gave Eisenhower every opportunity to admit that others in the U.S. Government had sent out that flight to sabotage the conference, stating that such an admission would salvage the meeting.

At this point, chances for world peace hung tenuously between the two men who liked and understood each other. Krushchev said: "These missions are sent to prevent peace." He was ready to accept Eisenhower's innocence.

Krushchev played the whole event with great patience. When he first announced the downing of the plane, he gave out very little information, waiting to see what our side would say. Then he displayed pictures of a heap of metal which he claimed to be the U-2, but was obviously some other junk. He kept drawing us out.

This was the period when some of the Government's media lackeys groped for ways to cover up the episode. In a strange editorial in its May 7, 1960, edition, The New York Times said that the U-2 flight was an "accidental violation", as several other border crossings may have been. They challenged Krushchev's statement that the plane had no identification. The Times quoted NASA's report saying the plane had "NASA" and the NASA black and gold seal on it. Both NASA and the Times were wrong. The Times was repeating NASA's lies. Next the Times said: "Krushchev said American militarists sent the plane, whereas it was just a NASA flight." The Times must have known better by May 7th.

After everyone had been thoroughly taken in by Krushchev's traps and the U.S. Government's lies, the big news broke on May eighth. The Times, caught flat-footed, came out with a big headline: "Russians Hold Downed Pilot as Spy." Who determined that a man carrying a number of U.S. military identifications was a spy?

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Senator Capehart asked Dulles: "Why did you have to admit that we were spying?" This is the point. Who was covering what? Was the CIA providing a cover story, "the Powers spy gambit", to hide the real purpose of this flight? The stark Times headline almost made it look as if it was the Soviets' fault. Then they quoted Krushchev saying: "I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well," and with amazement, Khrushchev added: "How many silly things they have said." He picked up one point which had been in the cover stories. NASA had intimated that most likely Powers' oxygen supply had failed and that he had flown out over USSR territory unconscious on automatic pilot. Krushchev quickly replied: "The oxygen did not fail." Then he pointed out that if the oxygen had failed, Powers could not have performed as skillfully as he had. He had performed perfectly until his engine failed, and the developed film from Powers' cameras proved it. Miles of clear photos were in Krushchev's possession.

When CIA Director Allen Dulles was asked who had given him authority for the flight, he answered, "Well, we had a group." That reply revealed a terrible misuse of Presidential authority with results even more devastating than Watergate.” [1]

It is obvious by this point in the tale that the U-2 piloted by F. Gary Powers was not on a spy mission as the procedures for such were violated from a very early stage in this flight. Very crafty planning to entrap Eisenhower in the lies to prevent the public acceptance of Khrushchev’s concession that maybe Eisenhower didn’t know of this spy plane’s flight. Someone was playing the game for keeps and quite well, so far. Think of it, the Summit was wrecked and the U.S. President was forced into admitting the depth and ongoing nature of the overflights.

This is a sad example of C.I.A. oversight of an operation being used to bend the operation to it’s own means or the means of it’s true masters, the military-industrial-complex with big oil and big banks and big business. It sure as hell worked like a charm, as with the Oswald-three-shots-lone-assassin smokescreen, today if any mention of the U-2 Affair is found in mainstream media the story or piece will refer to the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers being “shot down” by the Soviets on May 1, 1960. The reason is clear, the media are the minions of the powerful elite and the “free press” has been subjugated to serve their masters as part of an MKUltra-like system of mind and electorate control. Hence the deification of a senile actor as a heroic President when history speaks both loudly and clearly that abuses and empowerment of the Elite were part and parcel to Ron Reagan’s sleepy terms in office.

Recall Neil Bush's part in the S & L rape of American citizens? Or Iran Contra? Obviously not or another C.I.A. president would not have been SELECTED illegally in 2000.

Back to Col. Prouty’s commentary concerning 1960,

“But in 1960 when President Eisenhower launched his Crusade for Peace to bring about a lasting détente with the Soviet Union, one U-2 airplane, one pilot, and the invisible enemy shattered his dream. That U-2, flown into the USSR on May 1, 1960, by Francis Gary Powers was not on a spy mission as had been alleged. It was launched for the sole purpose of destroying whatever chance there was for peace. It was the weapon of the war lovers - the missile of the industrial complex.

Ike learned what other world leaders have learned: it is easier to wage war than to make peace. In war the enemy is visible, and he is usually on the other side.

For years the U-2 and everything about its clandestine operations for the CIA had been cloaked in a mantle of such secrecy that very few people knew anything about the plane or its missions. When the U-2 was lost over the USSR and then claimed by Krushchev to have been shot down, few people knew what was true and what was not. The whole world was caught off guard. It was not difficult to believe the contrived NASA-CIA cover story that a plane had been lost while on an upper-atmosphere research flight. However, that cover story was a lie twice over!” [1]

In the same article Col. Prouty made even more clear the central issue of the U-2 Debacle.

“Eventually, President Eisenhower took the blame for the whole thing, and his dream of a summit conference, trip to Moscow, and an around-the-world Crusade for Peace was shattered. Certainly he had the U-2 double-cross in mind when he delivered his famous "military-industrial complex" speech at the end of his term of office.

Nixon played a significant role in all of this. All clandestine activities must be directed by the National Security Council. The law requires that the NSC direct the CIA. To perform these most sensitive activities quietly, the NSC established a small and very powerful group for this purpose. That special group, 5412/2 as it was known then (later the 303 committee and the 40 group), was chaired by the Vice President. Its key members were the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, or their designated representatives. In the spring of 1960, that group consisted of Nixon, Christian Herter, and Thomas Gates. Since these were very busy men, they generally appointed a key official to represent them at meetings.

Here we get to the most important point of the entire U-2 fiasco. Who authorized it? Who sent it out? Late in the Senate hearings, Senator Gore got right to the point.

Gore: You [Dulles] have told this Committee that you received this approval [for the Powers flight] or authority after April 9th. [There had been a previous successful U-2 flight over the USSR on April 9, 1960.]

Dulles: That is my recollection.

Gore: ...from whom did you receive this authorization, who were the parties, and was the President one of them?

Dulles: Well, we had a group.

Gore: Who?

Dulles: Well, I don't know that I should go into names, but there was someone in the Department of State. DOD, and someone at the White House to keep general track of the operations, and it was through that little group that we received, after a flight was made, we were given a general clearance to make another flight.

[Dulles calls that crucial NSC clearance which is required by law, a "general clearance". Furthermore, Dulles does not mention the Vice-President, who had to be there.]

Gore: Well, if this hearing is to serve any useful purpose, and I sure hope it will, it seems to me that it can only come through learning of whatever error that was committed, if committed, in order to avoid it in the future, and to improve such techniques. You told us you received your authorization from a group and you have three agencies, the White House-I don't like to refer to the White House-I would say the President, the Office of the President, and the DOD, and one from the Department of State. Is that your chain of command?

Dulles: My line of command, yes sir, so far as the policy of flying or not flying was concerned.

Gore: Who designates these people from these three agencies?

Dulles: Well, there was no formalized delegation. This grew up as the best method of handling this, and I just can't answer that. I assume that they were properly authorized. They always seemed to act with full authority. And I don't know whether any formal designation was ever made or not.

[This is untrue, and in light of Watergate, it is a fantastic statement. Who in hell is running things? Dulles assumes they were authorized.]

Gore: Your authorization, your authority on this particular flight stemmed from this group.

Dulles: That is correct.

Gore: You do not know, then, whether the man representing the Office of the President was personally designated by the President

Dulles: I assume he was agreeable to the President.

Gore: I would, too, but do you of your personal knowledge, do you know whether or not this man was personally selected by the President, or by one of his assistants?

Dulles: I assume that he was, but I have never questioned that.

Gore: Do you know whether he personally reported to the President?

Dulles: I assume that he did, but I never questioned him on that...

Gore: I would assume so too.

Here is the most astonishing piece of evidence about the misuse of Presidential authority to come to light, including the Nixon tapes. The powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee was asking the Director of Central Intelligence where he got his authority for this infamous flight, and all Allen Dulles could reply was, "Well, we had a group." Then, when Senator Gore asked if Dulles knew whether the men in that group had the proper authority to issue such orders, all that the Director of the CIA could say was, "I assume that he did." There is the whole crux of the U-2 flight, the breakup of the summit conference, the chance for peace.

Because actual authorization could be bypassed by the assumption of authorization, and this has become standard procedure, illegal acts like the U-2 incident can be committed by those whose motives are to undermine the power and the process of the elected Government.

Then, to sum up and to underscore this terrible fact, Senator Gore repeated: "I was only asking you if you knew that he had reported directly to the President with respect to the approval of this particular program." And Dulles replied: "No, I don't know that." What Dulles was really saying was that he really didn't know who had sent out that plane. (It is fairly common practice to give some of these approvals by telephone. But how did he know who was on the phone?)(To verify this procedure I can tell you that I have been called at night by a person who said he was the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, General Thomas D. White. I was told by that voice to go to Allen Dulles' home and follow the Director's orders. I went there and was told that he had immediate need of an airplane for an emergency in Tokyo. Upon receiving this order I had a plane turned around in flight over the Pacific and returned to Tokyo, where it was used for the clandestine mission. The mission was successful, and I received a written commendation from the CIA.)

The point is that we did this by telephone. I ordered the action across the Pacific by telephone, and, as it happened, that deft move prevented a coup d'etat in a distant country. Of course, I knew General White's voice. But the fact remains that a clandestine operation run as Dulles and Gore described it is evidence of a very feeble method.

In this ominous by-play, we see the shadow of hands behind the scenes. If Eisenhower did not order the flight, who did! If Dulles didn't know whether the men whom he said authorized the flight had that authority, who knew! If someone had the inside knowledge to get away with launching an unauthorized flight, who was it! And if those people knew that the cameras must be protected, who were they? By the time you answer those questions, even by the time you ask them, you can draw the strings tightly around that very small group who actually did operate the U-2's in 1960. There were only three or four men able to do those things, and their names are in the Pentagon telephone book of 1960. I will not name names as it is not my intention to jeopardize these men's lives.

Later in the hearings the Senators wanted to find out if any orders had gone out suspending overflights because of the summit conference schedule. Dulles waffled that question, so they asked about prior events and learned that flights had been canceled when Krushchev met with Eisenhower at Camp David.

Later on Gore said: "One of the big questions before the country in millions of peoples' minds is why this flight was undertaken so near the summit." In reply to another question Dulles said: "I think the question could be raised, if it was done without the President's knowledge, as to who was directing the ship of state."[author's emphasis] Now, there it is! This was a most crucial line. Allen Dulles was beginning to have some grave doubts himself about the series of events. His answer supports the notion that he too did not know what really had taken place. Following is a first-hand experience that will prove to even the greatest skeptic that the Director of the CIA does not always know of clandestine activities undertaken by his own organization.

I was with Dulles and Bissell the evening they found out that a plane was missing over the Soviet Union. They knew nothing about it, and they had told the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and the President that not a single U.S. aircraft-military, Government, or commercial, was missing, as the Soviets claimed. Dulles called me to his house to meet with him and Bissell to see if I could locate a missing plane. I went to the Pentagon Command Center where I was later able to discover and confirm that a plane carrying nine U.S. Air Force men on a CIA mission was shot down over the USSR. It turned out to be Allen Duties' own CIA VIP airplane! He did not know about that, just as he did not know about the Powers U-2.

During the first six months of 1960, I was the focal-point officer assigned by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force to provide special Air Force support to certain clandestine CIA overflight operations. In April 1960, a member of the Chief's Pentagon office staff was in Thailand overseeing a major series of long-range overflights into Tibet and far northwestern China. Later that spring, orders come down to stop those overflights. The given reason was that the President wanted nothing to interfere with the success of his forthcoming Paris summit conference. Orders were sent from my office to ground the overflights.

These same orders applied to the U-2 program. We all took our orders from the same authorities. The U-2's were supposed to have been grounded along with the Tibetan overflights. So, when Allen Dulles himself wonders who was directing the ship off stage, it becomes apparent that he did not know who was running the country!

The U-2 is nearly forgotten today, and there will perhaps never be further investigation of this crucial event. Eisenhower and Khrushchev, both old warriors, might have pulled off a real peace agreement. We shall never know. But we do know some things.

Many of the top-echelon men who were in the Pentagon during those fateful days of spring 1960 are back there now in the Carter Administration. Others are in top positions throughout Washington. It may be that they know how easy it was to pull the rug out from under Eisenhower, and they know how they could do the same thing again today.” [1]

The only thing I have to add would be a caution to pay special attention to the names of the individual persons involved as they reoccur throughout the next half-century in the most peculiar places.

Yes the Senator Gore mentioned is the father of the popularly elected but unseated president of the 2000 election cycle. The former Senator ran into a hassle confronting the war-pig sick paranoiac Dick Nixon’s out of control war in Vietnam in 1970, so Senator Al Gore Sr. was targeted for elimination in the off year elections of 1970.

Does this make any clearer the bullshit thrown by the media and its chosen darlings of the rich and powerful rightists that control it? Doubters should look up a recent episode of A & E’s History Channel series of the Greatest Blunders. In this revision of history perpetrated by a media outlet the “shooting down” of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 was a mistaken blunder. The supposed shooting down of Gary Powers’ U-2 was neither a blunder nor a mistake, neither is the ongoing revision of history by the media. Keep doing your own thinking.

In May 1960 the reality of the power assembled by the elite had become clear to Eisenhower. How can it be any wonder that he spoke of the danger of the military industrial complex in his last address to the nation? It cannot!

I’ll close this chapter with a tribute to President Eisenhower’s stolen Peace Summit of 1960. If only it could have been then a reality. If the two WW II veterans could have found a way to work it out then, maybe no Vietnam and no Operation Phoenix, no Kent State, no contrived oil embargo of 1973 or 1979, no Afghanistan 1980 or 2001, all compliments of the deepest politics that wrecked your efforts in 1960.

Jim, roger your scenario, that CIA officers Bissell and Dulles with Nixon's collusion saw to it that Powers flew with identification and markings and inadequate hydrogen to insure the torpedoing of the Nixon-Khrushchev summit.

Charles points to the film The Package (1989) with Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones (college roommate of the son of the Gore in your post) as indicative of a working relationship between CIA and KGB, partners in the Cold War business model.

A question occurs as to Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972 with Henry Kissinger for tea with Mao and Chou:

As Helms put McCord, Hunt, Sturgis, Barker et al on the Watergate op to torpedo Nixon, was it in part out of a cool rage over the reaching out to the PRC?

Stone's Sam Waterson as Angleton-Helms versus Hopkins as Nixon is a condensed power struggle.

I recall standing in my grandparents' dining room by the wood floor radio as the announcement of Powers' downing and capture was made in May 1960.

It would have tarnished the Eisenhower-Nixon package--thus did Nixon shoot himself in the foot, losing to Kennedy who as "winner" won murder by the deep state.

Blaming Ike for the flight is a hundred eighty degrees out of synch as you note.

Much like blaming Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam.

Orwellian revisionism.

Did CIA mask the Soviet missile buildup in Cuba to a crisis point to insure at least an invasion and perhaps even nuclear war?

Nixon was brought down by a Mockingbird press responding to Deep Throat and spearheaded by spook Woodward.

Kennedy was brought down by Heydrich II using an Angleton product--in whose legend-building we see McCord.

And the final outrage: Powers killed when his news chopper ran out of fuel and crashed in 1977, a year so many died to streamline the work of the HSCA.

An experienced pilot takes off and flies without regard for the fuel guage. Really?

Yet who can believe Powers would be sabotaged twice? It is as though we doubt Putin's challenger Lebed's death in a helicopter crash in 2003 was an accident?

Pravda scoffs:

Boris Berezovsky said at once that Alexander Lebed had been killed, as his line was in opposition to Moscow, local authorities, and businessmen. Certainly, nobody takes seriously the reasons of the businessmen who is currently in exile in London. Probably, it is another attempt of Boris Berezovsky to remind people of his existence. Well, he is a success with it.

Three years following Lebed's crash, another in London was killed by polonium poisoning.